Do you really have to rebuild after every change though? In my limited experience developing Node apps, I'm usually been able to use vagrant + synced folders so that I could make a change on my desktop, sync it over to my vagrant box automatically, and the change taking effect immediately.

@wfsaxton We use grunt to listen for file changes and rebuild automatically. You could consider that as well

The reason why re-building is necessary is because some items are built once before you start NodeBB, and used from then onwards. This blog post goes into more detail about why we use a build system now.